OK people.

Time of Revelations has come.

Jobless, just with some non-regular income here and there, and my 5 years worth of reserves almost entirely depleted, I am close to the bottom.

I have started to think that perhaps fleeing was not the smartest choice, given that we had some other alternatives that could be managed.

This said, I have been under a serious retrospective, and I have arrived at some important conclusions that I will do my best to explain in the subsequent text.

When a collapse occurs, you'll have to make hard decisions.

One, my efforts to be independent of the power grid were not enough. Being the family head and with only one salary, and whatever I could earn with my former online job (that later would be my main income when the final stages of the collapse begun), that´s highly understandable.

However there were some precautions that worked very well: three gas bottles, allowing us to easily buy one bottle whenever the lines were short – yes, there were moments when the truck arrived and people were barely arriving, that we could go to take a place in the line, call home and my wife would bring the empty bottle. Upon her arrival, the line was already two or three hundred persons, with me being usually among the first 20s or 30s. Two bottles at home, one being used, another one in storage, and an empty one just waiting. I had to use my camping stove (gulf war edition) several times, but being over 10 years old and without being able to find a spare seals kit, it was not reliable to use and had to be stored again.

Now, with another reference frame, I can see how important is having affordable means to cook a meal. Gas is expensive as heck around here. Electricity? Forget about it. And open space is limited, so using a rocket stove is somehow…problematic, to say the least. Although I would love to taste my loved arepas made in the grill. Even better if they were made by my mom´s lovely hands.

Please let me use my imagination for a moment. Once the collapse in its final stage is starting, the trigger for me was to lose my larger income source. The regular salary was not enough to afford us a living, back then, and I knew it: we had to bug out.

I could have done things differently.